Poke is an AI agent that users access via text messaging (iMessage, SMS, Telegram and limited WhatsApp) to create and run automations and personal assistant tasks.
We’re the makers of Poke.com http://Poke.com, a proactive AI agent for everyday life. Interaction is a $300M consumer company backed by $27M from General Catalyst and angels such as Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Scott Wu (Cognition), Patrick and John Collison (Stripe), Fred Ehrsam (Coinbase), Ken Howery (Co-Founder of PayPal and Founders Fund), and many others. The Context For the last year, our core engineering team has built this entire agent platform from the ground up. Now, traffic and concurrent agent executions are scaling by orders of magnitude. We need engineers to harden infrastructure without slowing down feature velocity. We only care about technical depth, obsession with your craft, and how well you can build alongside us. Our current team is strongly connected and talent-dense, with backgrounds from Jane Street, MIT/Stanford research, and International Olympiads, but we care more about experience building than your pedigree. The Role Poke connects to users' email, calendar, and many other integrations, and takes actions on their behalf. Securing that surface is existential. We hire across many strengths under one title. You are a T-shaped engineer who can navigate the whole stack, but you are uniquely experienced in at least one of these areas: - Agent & AI Security: Prompt injection defense, tool use guardrails, sandboxing of untrusted model outputs, and red teaming agentic workflows. - Application & Product Security: AuthN/AuthZ, OAuth token and secrets management, secure-by-default API design, and threat modeling features before they ship. - Infrastructure & Cloud Security: IAM, network segmentation, workload isolation, and hardening high-concurrency distributed systems under heavy load. - Detection & Response: Telemetry pipelines, anomaly detection, incident response, and abuse and fraud prevention at consumer scale. - Privacy & Trust: Data minimization, encryption in transit and at rest, compliance foundations (SOC 2, GDPR), and earning user trust through the product itself. We work mostly in Typescript and some Python, but lack of experience in these specific languages is not a deal breaker. What we're looking for - Rigor under pressure. You move between infra, product, and debugging. You can stabilize melting systems while still shipping features. - Platform thinking. You design security primitives, not one-off mitigations. You build solutions that solve today's threats while unlocking ten future use cases. - Low ego. The talent bar is high, but no important problem is beneath us. Something Else If you don't fit perfectly into a bucket, that’s fine. We care more about ownership and technical depth over specific labels. Tell us what you are unusually good at, what systems you’ve owned, and why it transfers here. Include a link to your GitHub, a project you're proud of, or a breakdown of the hardest technical problem you've solved.